In Birmingham 1963, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. sat in a jail cell. During that time he received intense criticism and condemnation for his protests in the city. The people condemning these actions King organized and participated in ranged from congressmen to clergymen, and he felt he needed to respond to these statements being made by the “leaders” of the local counties and state. He did so in his jail cell, broadly addressing audiences and demographics around the country. But a demographic he paid special attention to was what he considered the “white moderate,” a group of Caucasian men and women that have practically had a monopoly on legal and social issues in a majority of states in the United States. He did so by addressing the failure of these communities to recognize the injustice that has occurred to minorities in this country since the foundation of the Union. Though it might appear King is attempting to reach out to and trigger a sympathetic response from the white moderate audience, some might argue that his tone is perhaps too aggressive and is meant to be interpreted as a strict condemnation of the white moderate for not being proactive about issues that have been ignored for too long.
Martin Luther King Jr. uses strong pathos that causes white moderates to realize the similarities between race relations in America and Jewish persecution under Nazi Germany. This rhetorical strategy is successful because the majority of white moderates saw the holocaust as something to oppose, but were less likely to oppose institutional racism in America. King says, “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.” By invoking the image of the holocaust, he reminds Americans that it is people like him who would be the most likely to help people who are persecuted by their government. During King’s time, the majority of the country feared communism and was religious. By telling Americans that he would resist religious suppression under Communist rule, he is showing that he shares the values of the majority of white moderates. He is a faithful man who resists oppression at every turn. The same ethos that cause him to oppose religious persecution in all of its forms are the same ethos that would compel those who truly share them to support the cause of civil rights in America.
